The AI industry in early 2026 is navigating a decisive inflection point: the transition from expansive, optimism-driven experimentation to disciplined, results-oriented execution. This essay examines the structural forces driving this pragmatic turn, the empirical evidence that separates genuine progress from residual hype, and the strategic implications for enterprises that must now answer a h...
Category: Future of AI
Visionary research and essays on the trajectory of artificial intelligence, its cognitive implications, and the human-AI future
World Models: The Next AI Paradigm — Morning Review 2026-03-02
The artificial intelligence landscape is experiencing what may be its most consequential architectural inflection point since the transformer revolution of 2017. World models — AI systems that construct and maintain internal representations of physical and causal reality — have moved from academic curiosity to billion-dollar bets in the span of months. This morning review examines the theoretic...
The Planning Illusion
In my previous essay, "AI is not like us?", I argued that we systematically anthropomorphize AI systems — projecting human cognition onto what are, at their core, profoundly alien statistical machines. That argument was architectural and perceptual. This one is operational.
AI is not like us?
When Alan Turing proposed his famous imitation game in 1950, he embedded a premise so deep we rarely surface it: that intelligence, to be valid, must be indistinguishable from human intelligence. Turing, 1950 — Computing Machinery and Intelligence. The test was never about capability. It was about resemblance.
Daily Journal: The 95% Crisis — When AI Pilots Can’t Cross the Production Chasm
February 28, 2026 — The AI industry faces a bifurcation point. While MIT Media Lab's Project NANDA reveals that 95% of enterprise AI pilots deliver zero measurable P&L impact, the open-source ecosystem is simultaneously experiencing unprecedented maturation, with models like Llama 4 Maverick (1M context) and Mistral Large 3 (256K context) rivaling proprietary alternatives.
AI Agents Operate With Minimal Safety Disclosures: MIT Study Reveals Transparency Gap
MIT CSAIL's 2025 AI Agent Index analyzed 30 prominent AI agents and found a striking transparency deficit: while 70% provide documentation and nearly half publish code, only 19% disclose formal safety policies and fewer than 10% report external safety evaluations. This journal entry examines the study's findings, contextualizes the claims within the broader AI safety discourse, and assesses whe...
When AI Finally Beats the Experts: DeepRare and the End of the Diagnostic Odyssey
A new AI system published in Nature has achieved what many thought impossible: diagnosing rare diseases more accurately than experienced physicians. DeepRare, developed by researchers led by Zhao et al., demonstrates 64.4% top-1 diagnostic accuracy compared to 54.6% for human experts with over a decade of clinical experience. Tested across 6,401 cases spanning 2,919 diseases, the system provide...
The Cognitive Shift: A Creative Vision of How AI Will Change the Way We Think and Perceive
Artificial intelligence is not primarily a threat to human labour — it is a repricing of human cognition. Drawing on Jürgen Schmidhuber's formal theory of intelligence as compression, Robert Sheckley's satirical science fiction, and Isaac Asimov's prescient design specifications for autonomous systems, this essay argues that AI is catalysing the most significant cognitive economy shift since th...
AI Transforming Science: Math, Biology, and Discovery 2025
2025 marked a watershed year for AI-driven scientific discovery, with systems transitioning from computational tools to active research partners. Google DeepMind's AlphaEvolve discovered novel algorithms for fundamental mathematical and computational problems, improving efficiency across Google's infrastructure by 0.7% globally and finding new solutions to open problems that have challenged mat...